"This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between July and September 2010. It is the third of the four reports planned for 2010. During this period, we were victims of one of the biggest BSD events of the year - EuroBSDCon. We hope that the ones of you who have been able to attend it have enjoyed your stay. Another good news is that work on the new minor versions of FreeBSD, 7.4 and 8.2, is progressing well."

The PBI system is interesting - if I recall this correctly, each PBI is meant to be a complete self-contained install of a program, containing all the dependencies. It wastes some space, but makes the system very simple to work with.

Interesting.

With how cheap disk space is these days, I can see the logic in what they're doing.

Speculating for a moment: I wouldn't be suprised if some of the additional disk space could be recovered via ZFS deduping.

It is a trade-off. Disk space is not so much of an issue. But if some commonly-used library contains a security vulnerability, lots of PBIs need upgrading. I am not sure if the average desktop user cares. And it's certainly not a step back from OS X application bundles, or Windows' "lets include all DLLs with the application to be sure"*.